3 Risk Free Methods of Making Gold on the Diablo 3 Auction House

There are many ways to make your fortune in the dark world of Diablo 3.
Playing the auction house is a nice way to earn piles of shiny gold without stooping to such lows as actually killing monsters or looting chests.

It's also a nice way to completely piss away all your hard earned virtual yellows if you don't know what you are doing.
There are thousands of AH sharks out there that are all seeing to continue growing their wealth by snapping up every good deal they see, so it takes more than a casual interest if you want to really make the big score on the AH.

Flipping items on the Diablo 3 AH require a bit of finesse..

However, what if you don't need to make those multi-million gold wins that the big fish are all going for?
What if you are happy making 10-50.000 gold per deal and prefer not to risk the money you've already worked hard to accumulate?

Well, in that case there are several niches on the AH that will allow you to score a small profit without very much risk on your part.

For all three of these methods the thing to keep in mind is that everyone loves a free lunch.
The reason that these methods of earning money are almost risk free is because they have a very steady market price and high market demand.

Therefore there are a lot of people that compete for these same items, so don't expect to just walk through piles of easy gold ready to be picked up.
Basically you are getting low risk for your investment but will also have to contend with a market that's also full of other bargain hunters.

SWTOR Money Making Status - The slow but easy way to 700.000 Credits

There are lots of ways to earn money in SWTOR. You can earn credits from doing your space missions or from running all your daily quests for example. These are both two sources of pretty decent income and will quickly line your pockets with space money. But what if you, like me, are kind of lazy and loathe the idea of wasting your game time on grinding out the same missions over and over?

Want to be rich like a Hutt? Got the energy level of one as well?
Fear not, there is hope for you still!

Being a veteran WoW player I have had more than my fill of daily questing. I can get behind the idea of having daily quests in a MMO. It's a way for the developers to ensure that the players will always feel they have something to do in the game, even when they've reached max level and completed all the normal quests.
However, it's also a way of creating content that will eventually suck out your will to live straight through your skull.
No matter how interesting a daily quest is (and the daily quests in SWTOR are not that interesting to begin with), the magic will be long gone by the time you're making your way through it for the 20th time that month.
So that's why I personally have forsaken the daily quests in my attempt to preserve my gaming sanity.

That's why I've taken a more comfortable route to earning my SWTOR money.
I've already shared with you how I got 100k at level 25, and I've also posted about making money on the GTN auction house and further elaborated on this practice in a later post.
Today I thought I'd share my own story about where I'm at now with earning credits and how I've been using a slightly less aggressive method of the one I've outlined in my previous posts.

I didn't really start to put any effort into squeezing the most out of the GTN until I was done with my Sith Inquisitor storyline. At that point I was level 49 and with little motivation to do more questing, I decided that it was time for me to dive into buying and selling on the auction house and see if that could earn me some space bucks.
My credit balance was a reasonable 637.000 credits at that time, which was the result of following the basic tips of only having gathering crew skills and not spending any money on the GTN as I was leveling.

4 Ways to make more money on the GTN in SWTOR

Making money in Star Wars: The Old Republic can be hard work. So you'll want all the help you can get to make credits as easily as possible in SWTOR so you can focus on the fun stuff like blasting people or slicing them into neat little cubes with your lightsaber.

I've previously written about the 4 steps I used to get 100k in SWTOR by level 25 and that's probably a good starting point if you've just come in fresh off the shuttle and need to make your first credits.

I've also talked about the 3 ways that you can make money off the GTN, which is the "auction house" system of SWTOR, and that's going to be my jumping off point for this post, so if you haven't already read this post then I recommend that you give it a quick read.

I'm going to take a little time and share a few pointers as to how you can improve "playing" the GTN. By "playing" I mean the act of buying and re-selling items from the GTN without adding value to the items.
In this post I'm only looking at crafting materials as these items are the easiest to "play" the GTN with.

I've used these steps for about a week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes every day, and so far my profit is about 400k credits.

Thanks to these tips I can now call myself a bona fide SWTOR credit millionaire

Here are my 4 basic tips to playing the GTN:

3 Steps to make money on SWTOR's bad auction house system

If you've played Star Wars: The Old Republic for more than 10 levels, then you've probably had some experience with SWTOR's version of auction houses, the Galactic Trade Network (GTN).
And if you've had the misfortune of using this particularly nasty brand of an excuse for a MMO trading house system, then you'll certainly also have realized that using the GTN is an exercise in frustration.

The design of the GTN makes it needlessly hard to find items quickly, because you need to select several subcategories before you're even allowed to search for a specific item. And there's no quick pasting of item names into the search bar either. All search terms have to be typed in manually, which makes the whole process incredibly tedious.

Why would you make this interface that way? Why! I demand you explain yourself, BioWare!

But perhaps there is a silver lining to this particularly unpleasant case of insidious Darkside UI design.

Since it takes a long time to find what you're looking for, it's hard for people to get a good overview of what is available on the GTN and what the market price is. The result of this seems to be that a lot of people simply dump their items in the GTN at the suggested default price that the game gives them.

4 tips to have 100.000 credits by level 25 in Star Wars: The Old Republic

Money makes the world go round, they say. This is true even a long time ago in a galaxy far far away in the game of Star Wars: The Old Republic, where money not only makes the world(s) go round, but will also enable you to go round the worlds faster, by buying yourself a ground vehicle as soon as you hit level 25.
Not to mention being able to expand your inventory holding capacity or just picking up a nice new piece of gear or mod from the auction house when you really need to.

So you'll want to get your hands on some credits in SWTOR and I'm gonna tell you how. At level 25 I had amassed just around 100k credits in game, and I had still bought every single skill available to me as I leveled up, and even expanded my inventory space twice (that's a total cost of 25k credits alone).
This meant that as soon as I got back to the Imperial fleet, I could go train the first speeder skill and buy my very first speeder, allowing me to ride in style and separate myself from those filthy filthy poor people that were still travelling using their feet.
How quaint!

My inventory (expanded twice) brimming with items to sell and my cash balance looking good

So tell us, oh rich one, how can we also amass these piles of currency and be part of that elusive 1%?
Well, I'll tell you. My tips are simple and straightforward, but judging by the amount of people that were complaining about lacking money for a speeder, they are not heeded by a lot of the player population.


1. Gathering skills are key

In SWTOR you're allowed to pick three crew skills, of which only one can be a crafting skill. But there's no rule that states that you *must* pick one crafting skill. Instead of going for two gathering skills and one crafting skill you should pick three gathering skills instead.

I suggest you pick Bioanalysis, Scavenging and Archaeology.
Why these three? Well, all these gathering skills are skills that you can use out in the play areas. You'll find nodes that can be gathered for all of these skills and for Bioanalysis and Scavenging you'll even be able to gather resources off some of your slain enemies. That means that you'll be able to get materials for 0 cost, so the sale of them is 100% profit straight into your pocket!

I've seen a lot of people advocating the advantages of Slicing, which is more aimed at straight up bringing in money directly, without the need for the middle step of having to sell an item to another player.
The big issue I see with Slicing is that it's not going to be corrected for inflation. That is, you'll always get X amounts of credits for a Slicing mission of a certain level, but the price of crafting material Y is going to increase as the economy gets going and players grow wealthier.

Sith Inquisitor Info Bonanza

I recently posted an article about the process of my class selection for The Old Republic. After much deliberation and pulling of hair (mostly my own), I finally settled on the statically charged Sith Inquisitor.
With the NDA on the TOR beta test going down just this last weekend, we now find ourselves with more info than we know what to do with.

I thought that it would be interesting to plunge a straw into this bucket of condensed TOR info and try to suck up as much as I could find that deals with the Sith Inquisitor. After a diligent extraction process, I present the results to you here.

This Sith Inquisitor class trailer should give you a good idea of what you are in for

The Basics

The Sith Inquisitor is the "caster class" for the Empire. Able to hurl lightning at his enemies, he is a class that lets you live out all your Palpatine fantasies, sans the melted face part. Inquisitors are the scheming puppet masters of the Empire. They are the keepers of the powerful secrets of the Dark Side. Where the Sith Warriors are blunt instruments that excel in subjugation by brute force and maximum destruction, the Inquisitors rely on more precise and subtle means of influence.

Of course, should that fail, they are more than capable of resorting to burning the flesh off your bones with crackling blue force lightning. You have to keep an open mind and stay flexible, after all. And if you really want to get up and personal, naturally the Sith Inquisitor is also quite capable with a lightsaber, for all your slicing and dicing needs.

Advanced classes

Upon reaching level 10, you will have a choice between two different advanced classes. For the Sith Inquisitor you have the choice of becoming a Sorcerer or an Assassin (no white outfit or wrist blades, sadly).

Battlefield 3 Multiplayer Class And Weapons Guide

I'm very happy to present to you my first guest post here on Light Speed Gaming.
This one comes in from Mike Derges from stinkyink.com, who gives us the low down on the various classes and unlocks in Battlefield 3

A question many gamers ask when they first play a class based shooter is “What class is for me?” this is almost always followed by “Which gun is good?” The purpose of this post is to give new players an overview of what each class offers and a look at some of the top gear for each.

Assault

The Medic class. By default Assault players spawn with either an M16A4 or the AK-74M and their tool of the trade a Medkit.

This allows Assaults to begin their careers as medics, throwing a medkit at your wounded teammates feet cases them to heal rapidly and you to gain points. The ability to keep your team alive is bolstered by the classes first unlock the Defibrillator.

The defibrillator has no kind of ammo supply and can be used without any kind of cool down other than it’s animation. Once hit a player will be given the option of pressing “A” (or “X” for our PS3 friends) to be revived. As well as getting them up and letting them get back into the action revives earn the medic equivalent points to a kill and negate the deaths impact on respawn tickets. For veterans it’s worth noting that unlike in some previous games de-fibbing an opponent does not damage him.

As for weapons the Assault class uses Assault rifles, while still deadly at close range ARs are geared to mid to long range combat and most come able to fire fully Auto or single shot. Key weapons to watch out for are the F2000 which is locked until the player gains 124000 points in the class and the M26 Mass under-slung which adds a shotgun attachment to the under-slung rails provided by most of the assault rifles.

It's weekend and time to get your Space Marine painted!

No, that is not some dirty euphemism.

This is for all those people out there, who take their nerdhood to the next level (this includes myself), and spend considerable amounts of time painting small plastic figurines.

These figurines are then used to stage dramatic battles between powerful factions of the galaxy, waged on your very own living room table (with or without impending risks from pets jumping on said table)

Now I have only been painting Warhammer 40k models for under a year and I will be the first to admit that I suck pretty bad at it.

An Ultramarine terminator. The very first Warhammer model I painted. I know it looks shit, but I was very happy!
Unpainted model to the left for reference of how it looks before some untalented noob mess it up